Men have always fought. And like no other magazine, Esquire has always chronicled war.

Writing in 1943, Lieutenant J.K. Taussig Jr., who commanded anti-aircraft batteries on the USS Nevada, chronicled the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "We were low on matches and I think somewhat more worried about running out of them, than about damage done to the ship." Taussig was writing from the U.S. Naval Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island. His leg had been crushed in the attack and he was still recuperating a year later. "Bombing seems to affect men this way," he wrote. "Little things become very important."

Two decades later, John Sack, one the original New Journalists, literally invented what the Department of Defense came to call "embedded journalism." In his 33,000-word "M," he followed a single Army company from basic training at Fort Dix to their first combat in the jungle of South Vietnam. The story, the longest ever printed in Esquire, filled nearly the entire October 1966 issue, and, abetted by the cover of that issue — the words "Oh my God — we hit a little girl" in stark white letters on an all-black background — it became emblematic of the war and what war journalism could be. Timely. Shocking. Compassionate. Extremely detailed and extremely close.

Sack set the stage for Michael Herr, whose "Hell Sucks," about Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, formed the foundation of what became one of the greatest books written about that war, Dispatches. Decades later, fighting an entirely different kind of war, Colby Buzzell wrote "The Making of the Twenty-First-Century Soldier," which formed the foundation of My War, the most riveting and raw book-length account to come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chris Jones's epic, National Magazine Award–winning story "The Things that Carried Him," from 2008, chronicled in unforgettable detail the death of Sergeant Joe Montgomery in the Iraqi desert and his journey home to the cemetery in Scottsburg, Indiana, where his body now rests.

In a 2006 story, Brian Mockenhaupt sits at the bedside of a fellow soldier whose skull, shattered by a bullet in Baghdad, is being rebuilt: "They sing to him. They pray and weep. And he does nothing."

Finally, William Broyles Jr.'s haunting essay from 1984, "Why Men Love War," puts it all together: Why men go to war — and why we continue to write about and read about war — for the madness, the horror, the fear, and the beauty that makes us understand something elemental about ourselves.

When I became editor in chief of Esquire, in 1997, I inherited an office that featured bound volumes of the nearly sixty-five years of issues that preceded me. They were on shelves above my desk. I immediately resolved not to look at them — ever — for fear of succumbing to paralysis.

I eventually got over my vertigo, but spending time in the Esquire archives can be a dizzying, overwhelming experience. Now there are nearly one thousand issues, many of them packed with work from the greatest writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ernest Hemingway is wedged next to James Baldwin, and they share shelf space with Tom Wolfe and Richard Ben Cramer. There's an entire issue dedicated to a single Vietnam story by John Sack, for whom the term "embedded journalist" was literally invented. His coverage of wars for Esquire, which spanned decades, is not far from that of C. J. Chivers, who reinvented war reporting for our time of terrorist attacks and jihad. Arthur Miller, Dave Eggers, Ralph Ellison, Nora Ephron, Martin Amis, Michael Herr … The bench goes deep, and deep, and deep … Philip Roth, Scott Raab, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Stephen King …

Trying to figure out how to jam so many of these writers into a single Eightieth Anniversary anthology is a thankless fool's errand. So we did the smart thing. We gave up. Instead of releasing a single anthology in honor of our eightieth anniversary, we're releasing ten. The eighty-one stories in these volumes (one for good luck, okay?) will represent the best writing the magazine has ever published. It would be difficult to claim that these are the best, because for every great piece by any single writer, there are two or three others that cry out for similar acclaim.

One ambition of Esquire's that has remained constant throughout the decades has been our drive to recognize and take the measure of the men who invent our world and leave a deep mark on it. It's fitting that we begin with "Great Men." There's Joe DiMaggio, who symbolized athletic grace and also suggested the ravages of fame. Fred Rogers, who taught us how to grow up. Ferran Adrià, who taught us how to eat. Roger Ebert, who, even after losing his trachea, speaks with a braver voice than most men will ever know.

Tom Wolfe took on computer legend Robert Noyce, and Scott Raab the greatest Hollywood icon of our time, Paul Newman. Twenty years apart, Joe Nocera and Tom Junod both profiled Steve Jobs. One inventor, two stories, but what's astonishing is how relevant and revealing each piece remains. Each of the men profiled in this collection is timeless. And that is something you can say about each piece of writing in this anthology. The men, the stories, and the prose in this collection all remain as full of life as the day they were first published. Both the subjects and, more, the skill of their chroniclers amaze, move, enlighten, and inspire.

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